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October 21, 2001Abusing images of children does not help family valuesAnyone who didn't get the connection between the Boy Scouts and Traverse City's Proposal 1 in recent mailings from Proposal 1 backers shouldn't feel bad. There isn't one. Despite the labored explanations of American Family Association hired gun Gary Glenn, the future of the Boy Scouts - and American values - is not on the Nov. 6 ballot. In a bit of political theater that outraged the local Boy Scouts organization and even drew a temporary apology from the local AFA, Traverse City was flooded a week ago with a postcard that abused Boy Scout images to sell Proposal 1. The problem is that the postcards weren't about Proposal 1 at all. The cards featured a photo of three young men dressed in Scout uniforms giving the Scouting salute to an American flag in the background. Directly below the photos are the lines "Protect our Boy Scouts" and "Support American values." In truth, Proposal 1 doesn't have anything at all to do with the Boy Scouts. But in a variation on the old bait-and-switch routine, their image was co-opted without their permission to help sell Proposal 1. Here's the wording of the proposal; voters are asked to vote yes or no: "Shall the City Charter be amended to prohibit the City from enacting, adopting, enforcing or administering any ordinance, regulation, rule or policy which grants special minority or protected status, quota preference or other preferential treatment based upon homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, conduct or relationship?" Not a Boy Scout in sight. Local Scout leaders were understandably angry that Scouting was drawn into the dispute and that the AFA used "children - in this case a particular group of children - to make a political point," as local Scout leader Peter Magoun put it. Glenn, the paid head of the Michigan chapter of the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association, made no apologies for either the postcard or his numerous references to the Boy Scouts during a televised Proposal 1 forum. Glenn's explanation was more of the usual scare tactics, an attempt to create victims where none exist in hopes that the fear would keep people from realizing what is really going on here. Proposal 1, the local and state AFA people say, would protect against "gay rights laws that are already being used in other Michigan cities to attack the Boy Scouts." The principles the Scouts stand for, Glenn said, "need defending when they can't do it themselves ... they deserve to have somebody stick up for them in the public arena." As we saw last week, the Scouts and their leaders do a fine job of defending themselves from their real enemies, those who would use them for political purposes. They were exploited by the AFA, spoke up and got what sounded like an apology from some local AFA leaders, if not from Glenn. But then even that local apology had a hollow ring by the end of the week, when yet another scary mailing arrived at the homes of local voters. This time there were no pictures of Scouts, but the words and the threats were the same ones that had Scout leaders talking about possibly pursuing legal remedies just a few days earlier. Why would the local group, identified on the flyer as paying for the mailing, apologize and then do it all over again a few days later? Because this is not a local issue or a local campaign any more than it is an effort to help the Scouts. |
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